"Poverty does not make people terrorists, but terrorists can exploit the frustration it creates and use it as a breeding-ground for violent ideas"
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Lindh’s line is built like a rebuke to two lazy stories at once: the comforting liberal myth that money alone can buy peace, and the punitive myth that deprivation naturally curdles into fanaticism. As a politician, she’s not writing a philosophy seminar; she’s drawing a policy boundary with moral consequences. Poverty isn’t an alibi, she insists, but it is an opening.
The sentence turns on a careful separation of agency. “Poverty does not make people terrorists” restores responsibility to the individual and, crucially, refuses to pathologize the poor as a ticking time bomb. Then she pivots: “but terrorists can exploit…” Now the agent is the recruiter, the propagandist, the organizer. The subtext is strategic: stop blaming an abstract condition and start looking at the actors who weaponize grievance. It’s a warning about narrative capture - how humiliation, stalled mobility, and daily indignities can be converted into a ready-made storyline of betrayal and revenge.
Context matters. Lindh served as Sweden’s foreign minister in the post-9/11 era, when public debate oscillated between simplistic “they hate our freedoms” rhetoric and equally simplistic “it’s all about poverty” explanations. Her formulation offers a third lane: socioeconomic stress is not the cause of terror, but it can lower the social immune system, making communities more susceptible to extremist messaging.
Politically, it’s also a mandate. Security policy can’t just be surveillance and raids; it has to compete with recruitment by shrinking the pool of exploitable frustration - without ever excusing the violence that feeds on it.
The sentence turns on a careful separation of agency. “Poverty does not make people terrorists” restores responsibility to the individual and, crucially, refuses to pathologize the poor as a ticking time bomb. Then she pivots: “but terrorists can exploit…” Now the agent is the recruiter, the propagandist, the organizer. The subtext is strategic: stop blaming an abstract condition and start looking at the actors who weaponize grievance. It’s a warning about narrative capture - how humiliation, stalled mobility, and daily indignities can be converted into a ready-made storyline of betrayal and revenge.
Context matters. Lindh served as Sweden’s foreign minister in the post-9/11 era, when public debate oscillated between simplistic “they hate our freedoms” rhetoric and equally simplistic “it’s all about poverty” explanations. Her formulation offers a third lane: socioeconomic stress is not the cause of terror, but it can lower the social immune system, making communities more susceptible to extremist messaging.
Politically, it’s also a mandate. Security policy can’t just be surveillance and raids; it has to compete with recruitment by shrinking the pool of exploitable frustration - without ever excusing the violence that feeds on it.
Quote Details
| Topic | Human Rights |
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